Unlike magnetic storage, solid state storage (e.g., NAND Flash) requires selection of a read threshold. The value of the read threshold affects the hard read values which are returned, so selection of the read threshold is an important step in the read process. To assist in selecting a good read threshold value, some other systems store side information, such as a number of 1 or 0 values which were written to a given group of cells (e.g., a particular sector or codeword) or a ratio of 1 to 0 values which are actually stored by a given group of cells. The amount of overhead information this consumes can be very significant, even if only a few bits of side information are stored for each group. New techniques for selecting a read threshold which do not require side information would be desirable. It would also be desirable if these new techniques scale nicely as the number of bits stored per cell increases and as the number of read thresholds involved increases. In contrast, some other techniques take increasingly longer to select next read thresholds as the number of bits stored per cell increases and as the number of read thresholds involved increases.